Ernie Pyle

War Correspondent

     Although there are newspapermen with richer sounding names (Westbrook Pegler, Heywood Broun, Quentin Reynolds) the skinny Hoosier, Ernie Pyle, was the most celebrated and popular correspondent during the 30s and 40s in the U.S.  Even before he started covering the war, his columns were widely syndicated.

     It is because of the the 75th D-Day anniversary back in early June that he is being considered here. Since that time I have read much of what he wrote. There is no need for me to attempt to write an essay about him; the Wikipedia article is first-rate. I simply want to encourage you to learn more about Pyle and read some of his columns. I will provide some below which you can either read or listen to. 

    The piece that led me to Pyle is this one: "The Man Who Told America the Truth About D-Day, By David Chrisinger," New York Times, June 5, 2019. He writes: "It wasn’t until Pyle’s first dispatch was published that many Americans started to get a sense of the vast scale and devastating costs of the D-Day invasion, chronicled for them by a reporter who had already won their trust and affection." He also notes that Pyle underwent "a sort of journalistic conversion", after which his columns became "more stark and honest." 

    He had already volunteered to cover the bombing in England and it is clear from his letters and his columns that he had seen enough. Still, he later chose to cover the war in the Pacific. He was killed on the island of Ie Shima by a Japanese machine-gunner in April, 1945.

     To learn more about Pyle, start with the website at Indiana University. From there you can read or listen to some of his WARTIME COLUMNS.  For a famous one that appeared on the front pages of many papers see: "The Death of Captain Waskow", Jan. 10, 1944. Indiana University is also the repository for Pyle's letters and columns - Archives Online at Indiana University. See also the website of the Indiana Historical Society. 

    Pyle was adopted by Albuquerque where he had a home which he was rarely in. See: "America's Most Loved Reporter: Ernie Pyle".

Roving Reporter

     If you would rather not read about war, have a look at the columns he wrote about various towns, villages, and people scattered throughout the U.S. and Canada. For over five years in the 1930s he and his wife travelled back and forth and up and down the continent writing six columns a week. They are typically about unimportant things, people and events and they are always enjoyable and usually funny. If you remember and liked Charles Kuralt, you will not regret picking up a copy of Home Country. A new edition was published as: Ernie's America: The Best of Ernie Pyle's 1930s Travel Dispatches. 

     They visited some places in Canada and you can find the related columns by using the index in Home Country. There is an amusing one about Dr. Mahlon Locke from Williamsburg, Ontario (here is a link to the Williamsburg plaque about Locke). Although I was not able to see a copy of Ernie's America..., apparently Canadian material was not included. ( I learned that from a good review of the book by Ken Cuthbertson, "Nomad in a Dead End,"  in the Kingston Whig-Standard, Dec. 30, 1989.)

Some additional sources: 

   For biographical material see the biography by his editor, Lee Miller,  The Story of Ernie Pyle. For reasons I don't recall I have a copy of An Ernie Pyle Album by Miller which contains all of the photos he couldn't put in his biography. 

   

    Pyle's war reporting is collected in: Brave Men; Here Is Your War and Last Chapter.  They are also conveniently collected in this book which contains a good biographical sketch: Ernie's War: The Best of Ernie Pyle's World War II Dispatches, David Nichols. 

   If you are interested in The Blitz, Ernie Pyle In England is very good. And if you are really interested read also the book by his fellow American, Quentin Reynolds - London Diary. 

And for a movie see:

"The Story of G.I. Joe (United Artists) is

an attempt to picture the infantryman's

war as the late Ernie Pyle saw it. Pyle

himself (played in the film by Burgess

Meredith) and nine fellow correspondents

supervised and vouched for the movie's

hard-bitten authenticity. The result is far

& away the least glamorous war picture

ever made. It is a movie without a single

false note. It is not "entertainment" in the

usual sense, but General Eisenhower called

it "the greatest war picture I've ever seen." 

TIME Magazine. 6/18/1945, Vol. 45 Issue 25, p64.